Lucas: the blockbuster is doomed

George Lucas thinks that the era of big-budget movies is coming to an end. We …

In a post-Oscar interview with the New York Daily News last night, George Lucas said that he thinks high-budget movies are headed for extinction. The Star Wars mogul boldly predicted that in the year 2025 (if man is still alive), the average movie budget will be a mere US$15 million. Lucas presented his reasoning thusly:

"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie. Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'"

Yes, George, let's look at what happened with King Kong. With a $207 million shooting and marketing budget, Peter Jackson's poor monkey only managed to collect $538 million worldwide. That's a 160 percent return on the investment (not even counting DVD sales, TV rights, or lunch boxes) and lands the movie at number 34 on the all-time box office list. OK, so maybe that wasn't the best example, and there are indeed movies that fail to make their investment back. Try gems like The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which both lost more than $75 million. That brings us to Mr. Lucas' second point:

"It's no accident that the 'small movies' outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. Is that good for the business? No—it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art! In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies."

Indeed, most of the true box office bombs have been long on cash but short on inspiration, creative talent, and/or common sense. Remember Kevin Costner's The Postman? No? Good for you. I've been trying to forget it for years. That's not to say that good movies automatically make a lot of cash (witness Van Helsing, $270 million revenue, $170 million budget), but it certainly helps. King Kong had a worthy helmsman in Peter Jackson, and Sam Raimi has treated the Spider-Man franchise well, both artistically and financially. Could movies like those be made on one tenth of their budgets? We'd be looking at throwback-to-1970 special effects, and there would be no Hollywood superstars involved. What George Lucas is proposing would make "movie star" as appealing a job as "truck driver" or "Ars Technica Staff Writer," not that there's anything wrong with that. The tabloid press would have to find something else to gossip about, and the movie industry as we know it would collapse under its own weight long before that.

Then again, we've been pointing outsigns of thathappening for some time already. The huge studios are fighting to stay relevant, while worrying about the wrong issues, and it looks like soon, the only companies that will make it are those that are willing to change with the times. Good old George may not have supported his argument all that well, but he's got a point after all. So look for Indiana Jones 4: Roughing It, starring Hannibal and Jacqui Cheng, to open at the public access channel in Aurora, IL, next fall. Save some popcorn for me.